Miami Art Week SALES HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ART FAIRS

It used to be that a reporter had to run all around the art fairs and buttonhole art dealers to get sales results. Sometimes they didn't even want to tell you.

Picture this, several years ago, a stout, pony-tailed gallery director, when asked about the price of his Pablo Picasso -- said to be the most expensive artwork at the fair -- sniffed and said, "It's not all about the money, you know."
Now, well, now is different. Dealers know that sales news can drive the action, especially when it whips up a little market frenzy over the latest hot property. So, enter the publicists who hasten to disseminate sales results, especially at the smart galleries like Pace and David Zwirner, not to mention most of the art fairs themselves.
And you can't forget all the art-market coverage from Bloomberg, the New York Times, bloggers and websites that, until only a few years ago, barely considered art fairs worth mentioning. Today's art lover is flooded with sales figures, with every report from the beachfront guaranteed to mention two or three or more high-level acquisitions by various celebrity art collectors.
Herewith, then, now that the parties at A-Rod’s and Aby’s are over and the private jets have flown off, a round-up of sales highlights from Miami Art Week. The report has been assembled in the post-modern way, from a desk in New York, where we aggregated information from all the sources mentioned above.
ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
An estimated $2.5 billion worth of art was up for grabs at Art Basel Miami Beach’s 260 booths, luring art tourists of all types as well as celebrity supercollectors like Dasha Zhukova and Eli Broad. Broad took home a large-scale Kara Walker drawing for $175,000 from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., while rap mogul P. Diddy picked up YBA bad girl Tracey Emin's white cursive neon, I Listen to the Ocean and All I Hear is You (2011), for £45,000 at Lehmann Maupin. P. Diddy also nabbed one of those interactive light installations by the collective rAndom International that were such a hit at Carpenters Workshop Gallery at the Design Miami fair.
New York dealer Christophe van de Weghe showed his blue-chip chops, with sales of a 2004 Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild for $2.8 million and a 1961 Frank Stella selling for $1 million. As for new talent, the bonanza was at Chicago’s Kavi Gupta Gallery, where Armory Show artist and all-around man-of-the-moment Theaster Gates, who performed at the fair’s opening ceremony with his gospel group The Black Monks of Mississippi, sold no fewer than 35 sculptures, most within the first three hours. Prices ranged from $30,000 for a plinth lodged with a porcelain plate to $250,000 for a wooden structure with a ceiling of lantern glass slides, which went to trustees of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Another hot young property, Brooklyn artist Carol Bove made something of a splash at David Zwirner, who sold all five of the Bove works on hand -- two paintings on linen and a set of sculptures -- for between $60,000 and $150,000, including one to the massive private Jumex collection in Mexico.
PULSE MIAMI
Now in its seventh year, Pulse and its director Cornell DeWitt are clearly atop the satellite art-fair circuit, with this year’s event drawing 15,000 visitors, including Hollywood tycoon (and recently fired Oscars producer) Brett Ratner and movie stars Adrien Brody, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas, who was spotted scrutinizing Paramodel’s miniature sushi truck sculptures at Tokyo’s Mori Yu gallery, part of the fair’s IMPULSE section.


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